Linking Scenes

You know, those scenes that join the action between two relatively major locations, where the character is walking/riding/driving, those are quite challenging to make engaging.   Often it's useful to skip them with chapter breaks, but sometimes that can't be done because of their placement in the narrative.   And it would look very artificial to skip over them entirely every time you run into one.   So what I find myself doing is diving into the character's mind, whoever's point of view has been taken, we see their thoughts on the page, as they considering where they're going and how they got there.   This lets you connect with the emotions of the character, true, but I'm also running the risk of disengaging from the current series of events.

I say all of this now because one of these in-between scenes has been next up in Songlord for a few days now.   It links together two quite action-heavy sequences, which makes personal reflection even more of a strenuous step for the reader.   It's natural for the characters involved to have fierce emotional responses, but not necessarily to carefully reflect over them.   Tomorrow, always a great prospect.   Tomorrow I'm going to write that scene, piecing together what I've written already with a couple of other scenes that I'm eagerly anticipating.

This issue of connecting scenes was less prevalent in my previous novel, Kosmos.   (*Minor story details for Kosmos to follow*)   In Kosmos, the characters could transport themselves from one place to another with a thought, dragging parties in their wake and easily linking together any scenery of setting I wanted.   Very convenient, but reflecting myself it makes the story feel somewhat disjointed.   I rush from one crux of the story to the other, without taking the time to fill in the necessary character building for the ancillaries.   That's something that can definitely be solved in a further draft, since the lack of detail isn't a lack of vision, there are already backstories for these people that I've come up with and drive their decisions, but it turned out to be quite difficult to impart that information to the reader without it feeling like a simple info dump.   To be improved, most certainly.

So, in the end, this has been quite a circular point.   The linking scenes are difficult to write, and I worry that they pull too much away from the crux of the issues being dealt with in their surrounding chapters/paragraphs, but missing them out is clearly a mistake.   If I come up with any magic ways around the quandary, I'll let you know.

Progress!

University exams take their toll, and I hadn't written any of Songlord in a few months, but now I've gotten quite a bit done for two days running!   I'm not entirely happy with everything I've written since taking up again, but such is the way with a project that's been left to gather dust, along with my skills, for too long!   I've had some really good ideas regardless of my current standard of execution, everything can be edited and improved later, it's important with this first draft to get the bones of the story itself down onto paper. (metaphorically)

And let me tell you, writing when you're tired is extremely difficult.   I'm currently working at Apple, a summer work placement, and I have to get up at 7 AM to arrive into work on time, so needless to say, I am very tired on weekdays, but still, Songlord now sits very comfortably on 76,882 words, a significant 4,000 or so words in the last two days.   I'm building up to a scene I really want to write, so that's kept me going for longer individual sittings than usual.   That's fairly common for me, when I really like a certain scene I have planned out, key story moments and character arc conclusions.   

Any Songlord spoilers on my blog will be marked clearly before they pop up, so any readers out there who are also working their way through the manuscript need not fear.   It's great getting back into the writing, and we'll see if I do anymore tomorrow!   I've got loads more to talk about Kosmos, the National Novel Writing Month, old parts of Songlord, and even how I write in general, but I'll save that for when I don't have any immediate content to write about. ;)

A Bright New Day

Quite literally, today was a bright day, and that's somewhat unusual in Ireland.   But that's not the point.   The point is welcome, reader!   Whoever you might be.   I'm Stuart Holland, and I'm an author, or at least I think I can be.   I've read in numerous places that keeping a blog is good for an author, both to reach out to his fans and to give himself some sort of structure, an expectation to continue so there's something to update about.   I've also been considering it for a while, and now, in the midst of summer vacation, I've got a chance to get started and maybe integrate it into my routine somewhere.

I write genre pieces, mostly novels, though I have done a few short stories.    Fantasy is easily my favorite, followed by science fiction.   This blog's name, "The Lyrum Vaults" comes from my latest fantasy novel undertaking, titled "Songlord".   I've had some great new ideas for that piece, which I'll hopefully be putting down into words on a page (well, a Word document) in the next few days.   But you'll hear more about Songlord in later posts, I've got plenty of time for that, and a big backlog of info to ground myself with.

My previous writing project before Songlord was "Kosmos", another novel but science fiction this time.   I wrote it during the National Novel Writing Month in November 2010.   If anyone out there is an aspiring writer, or just enjoys writing in their free time, whether to be published or not, check out www.nanowrimo.org and join me and whole load of other people writing your own 50,000 word novel in 30 days!   It's on every November, so no pressure.   I feel I should mention, since this is my first blog post, that I've got nothing to do with the National Novel Writing Month in any official capacity, nor the Office of Letters and Light who coordinate it.   Again, there will be more on that another time!


I've worked on many personal writing projects before these two, most notably my first novel "Alignments Clash".   I should mention that none of these are published yet, so don't go scouring your bookstore (or Amazon) for them just yet.   But with time, I'll be up there on the shelf somewhere, and hopefully a lot of you people out there will enjoy reading my work as much as I've enjoyed writing it.